A big chunk of my time goes to meeting with early-stage entrepreneurs. My goals for these meetings are: to get to know the founders as people, to learn about their product and business strategy, and to talk about whether and how we (Founders Co-op) might be able to help them. At some point in these continue…
A little while back I posted on BATNA, one of the few useful concepts I took away from business school. The topic is on my mind again because I’m currently participating in several unrelated early-stage financings (acting variously as advisor, counterparty and peanut gallery), where a strong BATNA can be the difference between a full continue…
Yesterday’s PE Week Wire included an interview with Marty Pinchinson, a co-founder of Sherwood Partners (a.k.a. “the undertaker” for VC-backed companies). The whole interview is great, but a few quotes in particular stuck in my head: “Everyone comes up with this cockapoo about startups. It’s not about being smart. It’s about being around long enough.“ continue…
Following up on my last post on Solutions in Search of a Problem, today’s post is about the best way to avoid that trap: engaging your prospective customers *before* developing your product. Too many first-time entrepreneurs are unable or unwilling to sell their vision without an actual product to back it up. As a result, continue…
Maybe I’m just cranky because the Seattle weather has been so terrible recently, but I’ve seen a bunch of ideas recently that I would classify as “solutions in search of a problem”. This is frustrating, not just because these aren’t deals I feel comfortable investing in, but also because the founders behind these ideas are continue…
Great post today from Om Malik titled “Why Small Really Is Beautiful“. His argument is that bootstrapped (or “lightly financed”) companies can deliver both more fun and better financial returns to their founders than venture-backed ones. I’ve tried it both ways, and I can’t agree more. Boostrapping is stressful as hell, but if you love continue…
Here’s a little data for you: yesterday I apologized to YC for our (stupid) decision to use their application form as the starting point for our Founders Co-op submission process. My post got picked up and reposted to Hacker News, the bulletin board for the YC community. The graph above is from my Lijit stats continue…
I’ve written many times about how much I respect and admire Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, so I was caught by surprise by a flurry of blog comments yesterday expressing outrage over the obvious similarities between our “apply” questionnaire at Founders Co-op and the YC application form. We absolutely modeled our questionnaire on theirs, continue…
Paul Graham (of Y Combinator fame) has a great post up on the growing funding gap between angel investors and institutional VCs. In his words: “There are companies that will give $20k to a startup that has nothing more than the founders, and there are companies that will give $2 million to a startup that’s continue…
Since we announced Founders Co-op a few weeks ago my calendar and brain have been randomized way beyond historical norms. In addition to my usual advisory and consulting stuff I’ve been meeting with all kinds of folks across the local startup ecosytem: prospective investment candidates, fellow entrepreneurs, angel investors, mentors for our portfolio companies, etc. continue…